superjan (u/superjan)

superjan commented on The first sodium-ion battery EV is a winter range monster insideevs.com/news/786509... · Posted by u/andrewjneumann

epistasis · 2 days ago

Gasoline engines are already 15% less efficient at 20F.

https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/fuel-economy-cold-weather

At -40F (-40C), it's generally good practice to just stay inside and not drive at all...

superjan · 2 days ago

That 15% loss reduces your range from 1000km to 850km? That hardly affects how useful the vehicle is. For EV that’s different story.

superjan commented on 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes? waspdev.com/articles/2026... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

kmm · 7 days ago

And a megabyte is depending on the context precisely 1000x1000=1,000,000 or 1024x1024=1,048,576 bytes*, except when you're talking about the classic 3.5 inch floppy disks, where "1.44 MB" stands for 1440x1024 bytes, or about 1.47 true MB or 1.41 MiB.

* Yeah, I read the article. Regardless of the IEC's noble attempt, in all my years of working with people and computers I've never heard anyone actually pronounce MiB (or write it out in full) as "mebibyte".

superjan · 7 days ago

Well the 1.44 MB, was called that because it was 1440 KB, twice the capacity of the 720k floppy, and 4x the 360k floppy. It made perfect sense to me at that time.

superjan commented on The $100B megadeal between OpenAI and Nvidia is on ice wsj.com/tech/ai/the-100-b... · Posted by u/pixelesque

breput · 11 days ago

Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B[0][1] is a very impressive local model. It is good with tool calling and works great with llama.cpp/Visual Studio Code/Roo Code for local development.

It doesn't get a ton of attention on /r/LocalLLaMA but it is worth trying out, even if you have a relatively modest machine.

[0] https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B...

[1] https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B-GGUF

superjan · 11 days ago

Oh those ghastly model names. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/version

superjan commented on AI is a horse (2024) kconner.com/2024/08/02/ai... · Posted by u/zdw

aaronharnly · 18 days ago

To keep torturing the metaphor, LLMs might be more like those electric unicycles (Onewheel, Inmotion, etc) – quite speedy, can get you places, less exercise, and also sometimes suddenly choke and send you flying facefirst into gravel.

And some people see you whizzing by and think "oh cool", and others see you whizzing by and think "what a tool."

superjan · 18 days ago

Maybe more like a fatbike for the mind: pretending to cycle with zero effort and exercise.

superjan commented on River Runner river-runner.samlearner.c... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

irickt · 23 days ago

What do the columns represent?

superjan · 23 days ago

Do you mean the column artifacts in the 3d rendering? It is rendering incorrect on my aging iPad.

superjan commented on Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video radiancefields.com/a-ap-r... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect

roughly · 23 days ago

Be sure to watch the video itself* - it’s really a great piece of work. The energy is frenetic and it’s got this beautiful balance of surrealism from the effects and groundedness from the human performances.

* (Mute it if you don’t like the music, just like the rest of us will if you complain about the music)

superjan · 23 days ago

Watch the video to the very end: the final splat is not a gaussian one.

superjan commented on Dark Mode vs. Light Mode: Which Is Better? nngroup.com/articles/dark... · Posted by u/seanwilson

WD-42 · 24 days ago

Dark mode after sunset, light mode after sunrise, obviously. Just as nature intended.

superjan · 24 days ago

The article didn’t go into this, but I suspect that a large part of the dark mode trend is due to evening/night computer use. If you don’t light your room, the screen is the only light source which is unpleasant.

superjan commented on The string theory hype machine will never die math.columbia.edu/~woit/w... · Posted by u/headalgorithm

torginus · a month ago

Unfortunately my understanding of physics stops at general relativity and quantum mechnics (which I did study both at uni, with some mathematical framework of understanding).

How would I advance from this point, what should I read to get a grip on string theory, including the concepts and maths involved? Could you recommend some resources?

Like why did they come up with the concepts they came up with, how does that help explain established theories and experimental phenomena on a deeper level, etc.

Also I've noticed there are several competing theories in this domain (like Quantum Gravity, String Theory, hope I'm not wrong), what are the odds that these theories end up being equivalent?

As others have pointed out, compared to classical physics, quantum mechanics describes the world of tiny distances and energies in greater detail while relativity becomes useful at the opposite end.

How would one construct an experiment whose results depend on both phenomena?

superjan · a month ago

I would argue that you don’t need to learn string theory as it currently does not predict anything we can realistically observe (as you need energies that occurred only at the big bang). If string theory is correct we could observe a “supersymmetric” twin of all known particles, however we haven’t seen these, and they could exist even if string theory is false.

String theory aims to explain all physics as manifestations of a mathematical concept best understood as a vibrating string.

Initially, the hope was that string theory could predict the particle masses we observe, but that hasn’t worked as it turns out there were many different predictions possible. String theory has also struggled to develop a version of the theory that does not contradict known properties of our actual universe.

Loop quantum gravity is not equivalent to string theory, except that it also tries to unify gravity and quantum physics.

As things stand, string theory is not falsifiable, while that is the case, you could argue it does not count as physics.

But, by multiple accounts, it is interesting math, which can be worth doing for its own sake, and it’s happened often enough that interesting math turned out to be useful somewhere. Just not for explaining physics.

superjan commented on How problematic is resampling audio from 44.1 to 48 kHz? kevinboone.me/sample48.ht... · Posted by u/brewmarche

pixelpoet · a month ago

I'm not sure I understand the "just generate it" perspective. If you want to generate a much higher sampling rate signal that has a common multiple of your input and output sampling rate, "just generating it" is going to involve some kind of interpolation, no? Because you're trying to make data that isn't there.

If you want to change the number of slices of pizza, you can't simply just make 160x more pizza out of thin air.

Personally I'd just do a cubic resample if absolutely required (ideally you don't resample ofc); it's fast and straightforward.

Edit: serves me right for posting, I gotta get off this site.

superjan · a month ago

Maybe the following helps: if you have a an analog signal where there are no frequencies above 22.05 khz, it is in principle possible to sample it at 44.1 khz and then perfectly reconstruct the original signal from those samples. You could also represent the same analog signal using 48 khz samples. The key to resampling is not finding a nice looking interpolation, but rather one that corresponds to the original analog signal.